M

Dir: Fritz Lang

1931

*****

M (aka M - A City Searches for a Murderer) was deemed by writer and director Fritz Lang to be his finest work. He may be right. I will always lean towards Metropolis just for its scale and influence but technically – in in entertainment terms – M is a far superior film in many respects and certainly the film of his I will always return to the most. Released in 1931, it is the father (grandfather?) of the modern day crime thriller. The film starts with a little girl called Elsie Beckmann who leaves school, bouncing a ball on her way home. She walks passed a wanted poster warning of a serial killer who is currently preying on children in the area. The school children sing the song about the murderer of children but it seems that only the parents are worried, the children carry on as normal. This is when Elsie is approached by Hans Beckert, who is whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. I’ve often wondered how it has become a tune synonymous with terror like the Jaws theme tune, maybe it’s a bit too cheerful, but when I hear it I always think of M. Beckert offers to buy her a balloon from a blind street-vendor and walks away with her. We then see Elsie's empty place at the dinner table, followed by her ball rolling away across a patch of grass and her balloon lost in the telephone lines overhead – a scene copied time and time again since in one way or another, three simple suggestions, each one more terrifying than the next but not in the least bit graphic of gratuitous. Lang decided not show any acts of violence or deaths of children on screen and later said that by only suggesting violence, he forced "each individual member of the audience to create the gruesome details of the murder according to his personal imagination". It’s this brilliant direction that makes M such a classic – Hitchcock was clearly a fan. Anxiety runs high among the public in the wake of Elsie's disappearance. Beckert sends an anonymous letter to the newspapers, taking credit for the murders and promising that he will commit others; the police extract clues from the letter, using the new techniques of fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. Under mounting pressure from city leaders, the police work around the clock. Inspector Karl Lohmann instructs his men to intensify their search and to check the records of recently released psychiatric patients, focusing on any with a history of violence against children. They stage frequent raids to question known criminals, disrupting underworld business so badly that Der Schränker (The Safecracker) calls a meeting of the city's crime lords. They decide to organize their own manhunt, using beggars to watch the children. Meanwhile, the police search Beckert's rented rooms, find evidence that he wrote the letter there, and lie in wait to arrest him. This is what makes M so exciting and so different, even after all these years. It’s the race to find him between the police and the underworld that make it such a unique piece – a sort of acknowledgement of a criminal code too – as child murderers are seen by everyone as the lowest of the low.  When Beckert sees a young girl in the reflection of a shop window and begins to follow her he is recognised by the blind vendor who remembers his whistling. The blind man tells one of his friends, who tails the killer with assistance from other beggars he alerts along the way. Afraid that Beckert will get away, one man chalks a large M (for Mörder, "murderer" in German) on his palm, pretends to trip, and bumps into Beckert, marking the back of his overcoat. After this point the manhunt really gets underway, leading to a climactic conclusion. The ending comes with mixed emotion, on one hand you’re glad the criminals catch him and you think he deserves the kangaroo court he finds himself in, until he utters the famous line: "What right have you to speak? Criminals! Perhaps you are even proud of yourselves! Proud of being able to crack into safes, or climb into buildings or cheat at cards. All of which, it seems to me, you could just as easily give up, if you had learned something useful, or if you had jobs, or if you were not such lazy pigs. I can not help myself! I have no control over this evil thing that is inside me – the fire, the voices, the torment!” You then see his crime as being part of an illness, which in many instances it is. Elsie's mother then follows this a few minutes later with "No sentence will bring the dead children back", and that "One has to keep closer watch over the children". The screen fades to black as she adds, "All of you". It’s a powerful ending, an eerie declaration that brought a subject out of hiding and addressed a taboo head on. Lang placed an advert in a newspaper in 1930 stating that his next film would be Mörder unter uns (Murderer Among Us) and that it was about a child murderer. He immediately began receiving threatening letters in the mail and was also denied a studio space to shoot the film at the Staaken Studios. When Lang confronted the head of Staaken Studio to find out why he was being denied access, the studio head informed Lang that he was a member of the Nazi party and that the party suspected that the film was meant to depict the Nazis. A telling declaration of guilt. However,  this assumption was based entirely on the film's original title and the Nazi party relented when told the plot. While researching for the film, Lang spent eight days inside a mental institution in Germany and met several child murderers, including Peter Kürten (known as the "Vampire of Düsseldorf”) who many believe Beckert is based on directly, although he later dismissed the idea. He used several real criminals as extras in the film and eventually twenty-five cast members were arrested during the film's shooting. Peter Lorre is brilliant as Hans Beckert, a role he gained much success from but would end up resenting as he became typecast. Lang offered him the lead role in Human Desire years later in 1954 but Lorre refused, remembering how badly Lang treated his cast, Lorre himself being thrown down concrete stairs a number of occasions while filming. Lang was infamously cruel to his cast but it often lead to a gret level of authenticity. M is a crime thriller classic, untouchable and still every bit as astonishing now as it was back in 1931.